Inquisition Quotes - Page 5

• I hope for an America where the power of faith will always burn brightly, but where no modern inquisition of any kind will ever light the fires of fear, coercion, or angry division.

  Edward Kennedy

  Fire, Light, America

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• After the survivor of the Spanish conquest has told his life's story he is convicted by the Inquisition: He posted no brief in defense or mitigation of his offenses, and when he was most solemnly advised by the Court President of the dire consequences he faced if found guilty, Juan Damasceno volunteered only one comment: "It will mean I do not go to the Christian heaven?" He was told that that would indeed be the worst of his punishments: that he would most assuredly not go to Heaven. At which, his smile sent a thrill of horror through every soul of the Court.

  Gary Jennings

  Christian, Mean, Punishment

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• All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Ignorance, Men, Law

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.312, Library of Alexandria

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• Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Condolences, Exquisite

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1878). “The Gates Ajar”

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• The investigation of consciousness has come to be regarded suspiciously by most smart people and by most scientists. That's a legacy that began with the Inquisition, which considered non-Christian spiritual inquiry as blasphemous.

  David O. Russell

  Christian, Spiritual, Smart

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Numbers, People, Progress

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• If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.

  John Rawls

  Views, Europe, People

  John Rawls, Samuel Richard Freeman (1999). “Collected Papers”, p.621, Harvard University Press

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• In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Morning, Atheist, Commitment

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• I recall that I had a terrible struggle finding anything antireligious in the school libraries.But many years later my family moved into a house where a woman had left a box of books containing 20 volumes on the history of the Inquisition. I found out there was a word for people like me: "heretic." I was kind of delighted to find I had an identity.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Book, Struggle, School

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• Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Maturity, Giving

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition. I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence. Not beautiful in the sense of "oh it's flowy" but in the sense that it really does what it's supposed to do, it what I want it to say.

  Lynne Tillman

  Beautiful, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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